The end of the scroll

Social media is fun, I understand, and to be honest it is one of those things I was slow to adopt, and then embraced. It is one of many things that seemed "good" to start with and then "went to shit". There are so many things like that, even the "US constitution", it seems.

But, like everyone else, I embraced the infinite scroll, reading the "feed".

But recently I made a conscious decisions to step back. I ditched Twitter years ago, and with FaceBook's latest terms, I ditched (and deleted) them too.

This has some implications...

I am no longer have any social media interaction with "locals", i.e. people in Abergavenny. To be fair I was somehow blocked from "Abergavenny Voice" (and I literally have no clue why, and was not told). I was in one of the many alternative local groups on Facebook (there are always some). In the past I have been a major contributor (like when I decided to repaint the old iron cast road sign on my road). This I miss, to be honest. I'd like some way to be in a local community chat, somehow.

I am no longer on any family chat on social media, but that is not an issue as I am on the iMessage groups with friends and family (and for one person, WhatsApp, for now). So that is no loss, good. My wife is not on Facebook nor Twitter so they (the family) sort of cope. Good.

I do see news, from many of the 1100 people I follow on Mastodon, but much less in terms of "fake news", and no adverts. What I see is often "interesting". It is not some algorithm to feed me, it is real people, and I control who I follow.

But the most noticeable thing is the "end of the scroll".

This will be something unheard of by the users of most social media - but it happens on Mastodon. I read the feed, and get to the end of new posts. That is it. The end! No algorithm finding new "engagement" for me. No adverts. Just the end! I can reload and see one or two more, but not close to how fast i can read them.

So what now - well - it means, when at coffee in the morning, I get to the point of "put my phone down", and actually talk to my wife. We have apparently been married nearly 36 years, crazy.

I do recommend it, and I also welcome some way to make a "local community" chat that is not a shit-show, somehow. That is the one thing missing.

toot

toot

Twice I setup Mastodon.

Once many years ago - I followed the step but step guide and got it working. It worked for quite a while and then broke - out of disk. I gave up.

Then a second time we easier - this time my ops team set me up a VM, and Mastodon had improved a bit, so set up again, following the instructions. Again it worked. It caused problems as it was a "new" instance on an existing domain, and that caused things that had cached stuff to get confused. It got sorted, people had follow requests they had to cancel and try again, that sort of thing.

These days it seems to have a lot more "cleanup" logic, and a lot more obvious on disk usage, but still far from perfect from what I can see.

WTF is it not simple?

My big issue really is that Mastodon should be like apache, or many other quite complex systems, which are basically apt install mastodon. That really is what it should be. Simple as that. The web interface or command line could take you through the initial steps for admin user password and domain name and so on, but that should be it.

There are docker instances. I know nothing about docker, but I am told they sort of just work. Maybe that is the answer?

But why is it not as simple any anything else on linux, really. It seems Ruby is the main problem, as is python it seems. A pain in the arse.

But all is well, so not problem.

Yes, all is well, and even upgrading to next mastodon version as needed was not that hard. Again, following a load of step by step instructions not a simple apt upgrade mastodon or some such. But not rocket science.

But err, then, it broke. Basically the ops team wanted to upgrade Debian to bookworm, which is fair enough, but doing so cleaned out almost all of the stuff Mastodon needs.

Now I am not just upgrading Mastodon, and not installing Mastodon (as I don't want to lose/break what I have), I am sort of trying to make it work from instructions that are one or the other, and constantly hitting stupidities like OpenSSL is not available (how the fuck is that not standard in these tools?!) and not clue how to fix that.

I gave up

I must be getting old, because, yes, I gave up, it is too much of a pain in the arse, and I have better things to do. I tried, honest, but life is too short.

Bring in the experts!

The simple answer is to call in some experts. In this case Mythic Beasts. They actually run the A&A instance because my ops team were smart enough to not go near this with a barge pole.

They are not only running my instance, but in very short order managed to copy all the stuff from the old, and now broken, instance over, and make it continue seamlessly for me, well mostly - some avatar issues they are fixing. But followers, and so on, all working. I have not missed anything and was off for a day at most.

It is not cheap, it is several hundred quid a year. But what do I value my time at?

There is an irony here. I am paying that for my social media. If the likes of Twitter had people paying that for a really good, clean, not sales/advertising/pushy/confrontational/stressy service, they would make a fortune. That is not their business model.

The only mitigation is it may end up being more than just me - some family members, when they finally catch this boat. Of course, subject to whatever stupid rules the Online Safety Bill may create, LOL!

🦣

Back on the Mammoth, having re-installed Mastodon.

You don't have to set up your own instance. You can simply join any of the bigger mastodon servers. If you want to make your own, it is still a pain to set up, but the instructions do work if you follow them carefully. Here.

The larger servers are struggling a little right now, after the Musk take-over of twitter has been announced. Seems a lot of people think Mastodon is viable alternative. It may be, but it is different.

It is much more of a "social" network in that you have to socialise, and talk to people, to get followers and find who to follow. But no adverts and no "algorithms".

But I am here, on Mastodon, again, toot.me.uk/@revk so do follow me if you like any of the stuff I do/say.

P.S. As this is a new server, some servers have the old stuff cached in some way, so I may have to follow you first to get it to sort itself out. Let me know if you have problems following me.